How to Report the Time of Those Non-Project Work in Atlassian JIRA?

Posted by Aleks Yenin

First of all, we would like to say that JIRA is more “issue based” system than “project based” one. The user sees mostly the issue itself with the comments history and custom fields. So we highly recommend to create issues for such activities as meetings, transfers, etc. The main question is: what project should the issue belongs to?

We see 2 major possibilities with this case:

The meeting or transfer is related to the project activity – i.e. – you have scrum daily meetings regarding the particular sprint, or you have the brainstorm. In such a situation you should create proper issue inside the same project.

You have an activity that can’t be included in any of the existing projects. As for our experience – the best practice is to create a separate project for all such kind of activities and track time in the issues. The project can be named as “Internal Activities” or “Internal”.

Here is a recommendation regarding the setup: create separate issue type, create a workflow and screen scheme that will correspond to the business processes of those activities. If you have the security requirements – create security level in your security scheme that will include reporter and management group only and add a postfunction inside the workflow that will automatically apply that level – that will bring limitation to see only own issues for regular staff, and transparency for the management. Don’t create one issue for multiple users so they could track the time inside that issue – that will bring more chaos than an organization – use the rule: one issue – one responsible person (assignee). Don’t afraid to have a lot of similar small atomic issues – that will help you to track all the information and make a complex report based on filters / search results.